Polkadot (DOT)
Basics * The Web3 Foundation will commission Parity Technologies to build the Polkadot network. The Genesis block launch of Polkadot is anticipated to happen in Q3 2019. * First parachain successfully connected to Polkadot (22-10-2019) * Melonport has also taken up the challenge of deploying the Polkadot network after the whitepaper was published. But so far hasn't delivered. ICO * Had an ICO which had quite some problems due to the Parity client hack in late 2017. * "Polkadot, raised more than $145 million in a token sale last month and is currently having to deal with $98 million-worth of its ether funds being locked up in Parity because of the flaw. In a blog post, the Web3 foundation, which supports the Polkadot project, asserted that all work will continue regardless of the frozen funds." Tech * "Polkadot is a heterogeneous multi‑chain technology. It consists of many parachains with potentially differing characteristics which can make it easier to achieve anonymity or formal verification. Transactions can be spread out across the chains, allowing many more to be processed in the same period of time. Polkadot ensures that each of these blockchains remains secure and that any dealings between them are faithfully executed. Specialised parachains called bridges can be created to link independent chains. Polkadot is built to connect private/consortium chains, public/permissionless networks, oracles and future technological developments yet to be created in the Web3 ecosystem. It enables an internet where independent blockchains can exchange information and trust-free transactions via the Polkadot relay chain, with the key tenets of scalability, governance and interoperability. * By connecting these dots, we allow for the development of a truly decentralized web, serving as a foundational building block for the creation of an ecosystem of Dapps and services that will distribute power and equity for the common good." * "Some of these teams are preparing for Polkadot’s launch today by building on the Substrate technology stack. Polkadot parachains don’t have to be built on Substrate, but they can be and it is easy for them to be used in Polkadot. For Substrate chains to become parachains there is very little technical overhead or extra coding. The chain simply needs to bond DOT tokens to lease a parachain slot on the Polkadot protocol and access the global network of blockchains." DAO * Created a DAO. "Anyone who holds DOT tokens from the prior token sale will be given a proportional amount of reputation to vote on proposals within the PolkaDAO. This reputation is initially given 80% for DOT holders and 20% for individuals and teams who have contributed to the initial rollout of PolkaDAO in some fashion, community building or otherwise." More info can be found here * Chainlink will make off-chain data feeds, APIs, and traditional payment services available to all contracts on the Polkadot network. “We intend to drive the development of an oracle parachain together with the Chainlink team,” said W3F Executive Director Peter Czaban. Announced: October 2018 * Kusama Network is an early, unaudited and unrefined release of Polkadot. Interesting approach to launching the main network by the Polkadot team, by releasing ahead of it a highly experimental, community owned version of it with real economic conditions and no central kill switch. Its native token will follow the distribution of DOTs and allow its holders to perform the sort of functions that DOT would enable in the main network. The incentive is that 1% of DOTs at Polkadot genesis time will be distributed to Kusama’s stakeholders and community. UPDATE: is on track for switching to PoS this week (23-10-2019). Polkadot vs Comos * You can check out an explanation on how it is different (27-4-2019) then Cosmos here, or check out quoted parts down here but I would recommend to read the whole piece. Local vs Global Security: "Parachains are blockchains within the Polkadot network. (''Update (22-10-2019): First parachain successfully connected to Polkadot) ''These chains have their own state machine, their own rules, and their own local block producers (collators). Each parachain is essentially an independent state machine, and can utilize any type of unique functionality, consensus algorithm, transaction cost structure, and so on. In the Polkadot Network, all the parachains are children of a parent chain called the Relay Chain, which contains some representation of a “global state” of all the parachains combined. The Relay Chain has its own consensus algorithm called GRANDPA consensus, which finalizes blocks on the parachains quickly. Through this model, parachains in Polkadot operate under a “shared security” model — if the Relay Chain is highly secure with 1000s of validators, any parachain will benefit from this strong security by simply connecting to the Relay Chain. This allows parachains to have sovereignty over their state machine and other local rules, as well as strong security shared with hundreds of other chains. T''he drawback to this model is that the validators in the Relay Chain have the final say over state changes made in any parachain. For example, the validators could, for some reason, continually reject blocks that come from collators of a specific parachain and permanently block the parachain’s progress from being included in the global state. Polkadot tries to reduce this from happening by shuffling validators so that they validate random parachains, lowering the possibility of a specific validator censoring a specific parachain. Polkadot also has another class of validators called Fishermen, who continually check the validators for malicious activity."'' Governance: "(A) difference between Polkadot and Cosmos is with regard to governance and membership. In the Polkadot network, there is one single Relay Chain and some number of parachains that the validators of the Relay Chain can support. The current estimate is that there will be 100 slots for parachains, but this number can shrink or grow in the future. The Polkadot Network allocates slots for becoming a parachain via an auction mechanism — the highest bidder is able to secure a parachain slot for some fixed time duration by locking up DOTs (the native cryptocurrency of Polkadot) in a Proof-of-stake system. This means that to become a parachain in the Polkadot Network, you would need to purchase a large amount of DOTs and lock them up for as long as you want to continue being a parachain." "In the Polkadot Network, governance decisions are determined by the amount of DOTs voters have. There will be a formal mechanism for voting on-chain, but it has not been finalized and the latest updates are here. Other than regular stake-weighted voting, Polkadot also uses the idea of a council to represent passive stakeholders. This council is a group of people, starting with 6 people and adding one every two weeks until 24 people. Each of the members is elected through an approval vote. While the specific details of this governance process are yet to be finalized, the implications are that there are ways to change parameters in the Relay Chain such as block time, block reward, etc., as well as ways to change membership rules for parachains. For example, the Polkadot governance process could change the number of DOTs required or the auction mechanism to become a parachain. A common misperception is that DOT holders can vote to kick out parachains at will, but in reality DOT holders can only change the process of membership. This means that a bonded parachain stays bonded throughout its entire lease." Consensus mechanism: "The Polkadot Relay Chain uses a consensus algorithm invented by the team called GRANDPA. This algorithm allows the Relay Chain to finalize many blocks from all the parachains quickly and can also accommodate a large number of validators (over 1000). Simplistically, this is because not all the validators need to vote on every single block — instead, validators can vote on a single highest block they think is valid, and the algorithm transitively applies the vote to all ancestors of that block. Through this, the algorithm finds the set of blocks which have a supermajority vote and considers that final. GRANDPA is still under development and we do not know how it will perform in the real world. The parachains can use a variety of consensus algorithms to come to local consensus. Polkadot provides a software development kit (Substrate) that comes with 3 consensus algorithms out of the box: GRANDPA, Rhododendron, and Aurand. It is likely that more algorithms will be added to Substrate and will be usable within the Polkadot Network." * Link on how Polkadot's Grandpa consensus algorithm works. Substrate vs Cosmos SDK "Both Polkadot and Cosmos offer a software development kit, called Substrate and the Cosmos SDK respectively. They are both intended to make it easy for developers to start building their own chains, and include various modules out-of-the-box, such as governance modules (voting systems), staking modules, authentication modules, and so on. The main difference between the two is that the Cosmos SDK supports Go, whereas Substrate supports any language that compiles to WASM (Web Assembly), giving more flexibility to developers." * "In conclusion, (...) the biggest advantages of Polkadot over Cosmos are the following: # Application developers do not need to bootstrap their own security # If they can solve data availability, interchain messaging under shared security is easier # They seem to be more ambitious with Substrate (WASM, more consensus algorithms & modules out-of-the-box) # Focus on arbitrary message passing better for cross-parachain contract calls. (Still unsure of use case today) # Seems to have more developers building version 1.0 Conversely, the advantages of Cosmos compared to Polkadot are the following: # Cosmos is live. Polkadot is not. (27-4-2019) # Polkadot has a restrictive & possibly expensive parachain membership process # More customizability is better for specific projects (e.g, Binance) # Evil validators of parachains could spread corruption throughout entire network. Cosmos restricts corruption to only within the zone & corresponding assets # Cosmos SDK used by many projects already # Focus on asset transfers simpler & easier to get right. Proven use case today. * Another comparison between the two projects can be found on the Cosmos forum. Teams Building on Substrate and Polkadot * ChainLink - developing an oracle (announcement) * 0x protocol - decentralized exchange (Tweet) * AdEx - implementing their registry (announcement) * ChainX - developing a Bitcoin and Ethereum bridge (announcement) * Ocean Protocol - ecosystem for sharing data (presentations) * Energy Web Foundation - building an energy network (announcement) * Clovyr - service to easily build a blockchain (demo) * iExec - decentralized cloud computing (announcement) * Agoric - secure smart contracts (website) * Edgeware - building a WASM-based smart contract platform (website) * Robonomics - cyber-physical systems integration (Twitter status) * Katallassos - financial contacts (website) * Asure Network - social security network (website) * OpenNetSys - easily build dApps (website) * Kilt Protocol - identity trust market (website) * Blink Network - lightning fast payments (website) * Akropolis - global pensions infrastructure (announcement) * Speckle OS - universal identity and account parachain (announcement) * Polkascan - block explorer to mine data on all chains (announcement) * Polkawallet - mobile wallet (Twitter) * Imagewallet - a universal software wallet (reddit) * Melonport - on the back end Team, partners, etc. * Gavin Wood created the whitepaper and is maintaining Polkadot. * Is 'friends' (partnered) with: ZCash, Melon, Golem, Gridsingularity (Gavin Wood is a co-founder), Waves, Fragment, Colony, Gnosis, BigChain DB, Soramitsu, Slock.it & BlockEx Ltd. * Is part of the DAOstack ecosystem (still as of 20-1-2020) as is Gnosis * From Proof of Work #79 (19-11-2019): "New Polkadot Ecosystem Fund launched by Web3 Foundation and Polychain Capital to support teams building Polkadot parachains."Category:Coins/Tokens Category:Companies/Organisations